Reporter | Cheng Di
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In the past two years, Wei Jianjun, who has always been serious, has become a well-known "golden sentence king" in the automotive industry.
In July 2020, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the birth of Great Wall Motors, he threw out a "soul torture" that made countless Great Wall people extremely afraid: "Will Great Wall Motors survive next year?" ”
In October 2021, when many mainstream car companies at home and abroad have entered the fields of mobile phones and flying cars, he directly made a clear statement at an internal meeting: "Great Wall Motors only builds cars well, does not build mobile phones, and does not go to heaven." ”
In June of the same year, he made a promise at the Great Wall Motor Science and Technology Festival: "Sales will reach 4 million units in 2025, of which new energy vehicle sales account for more than 80%, and operating income will exceed 600 billion yuan." ”
Image source: Great Wall Motors
Now that it is January 2022, how will the Great Wall "stand" in 2021? Can the future be as Wei Jianjun said, can we achieve the set goal of 2025?
According to the official data just released by Great Wall Motors, Great Wall Motors not only became the second Chinese automobile company to break millions of sales in 2021, but also broke million sales for six consecutive years, reaching 1.28 million units, an increase of 15.2% year-on-year. In particular, the new energy vehicle segment, with annual sales of 136,953 units, has accounted for 10.7% of the total sales, a record high.
According to the first three quarterly reports released in early November last year, Great Wall Motors had achieved new car sales of 884,000 units, with a total operating income of 90.797 billion yuan, an increase of 46.11% year-on-year; and a net profit of 4.945 billion yuan, an increase of 91.13% year-on-year. Compared with 63.429 billion yuan in 2017, 66.645 billion yuan in 2018, 62.578 billion yuan in 2019 and 62.143 billion yuan in 2020, it is obviously the best three quarterly reports of Great Wall Motors in the past five years.
However, if you want to achieve the "big goal" of "sales of 4 million vehicles in 2025, of which new energy vehicle sales account for more than 80%, and operating income exceeds 600 billion yuan", it seems that there is still a long way to go, because this means that Great Wall Motors' sales in the next four years will increase by more than 3 times and revenue by more than 4 times. In particular, the sales volume of new energy vehicles needs to increase by 55 times, with a compound annual growth rate of more than 120%.
Although the difficulty coefficient of this "2025 strategy" is very high, the "small goal" of 2021 has been achieved. At the same time, the "single subject report card" of several brands under Great Wall Motor in 2021 is also quite remarkable.
The first is the most familiar Haval brand.
The Great Wall Motor Ace, which specializes in SUVs, sold a total of 770,008 new vehicles, an increase of 2.6% over 2020. Among them, the Haval H6, known as the "SUV brother", has sold 370,437 vehicles throughout the year, and has won the domestic SUV sales championship for more than 100 months.
The Euler brand, which takes the electric route and the women-only route, sold a total of 135,028 new cars in 2021, a 140% increase year-on-year. A total of 20,926 new vehicles were sold in December, exceeding 20,000 for the first time, an increase of 64.2% year-on-year, and has also sat in the top camp of domestic electric vehicle brands.
Among the tank brands that focus on medium and large luxury off-road SUVs, the annual delivery volume of the Tank 300 has reached 84,588 units, and the order has reached 220,000 units. The Tank 500, which was officially unveiled at the Guangzhou Auto Show last year, received 22,654 pre-orders on the day of the pre-sale, and 27,048 valid orders in half a month. At present, on the salted fish, the transfer price of the top 100 has been speculated to more than 20,000 yuan for the order transfer post of tank 500.
There is also the most important pickup truck plate of Great Wall Motors. Sales in 2021 were 233,006 units, up 3.6% year-on-year. Among them, the cumulative overseas sales reached 43,599 units, a year-on-year increase of 119%, maintaining the first domestic and export sales for 24 consecutive years, and the global cumulative sales volume has exceeded 2 million vehicles.
Great Wall Motor's smart car brand, Weipai, also completed a counterattack in 2021, with cumulative sales of 58,363 vehicles. Perhaps Wei brand's sales performance is not particularly eye-catching compared to other brands, but its primary task in 2021 is to make a preliminary layout in product technology. For example, the main intelligent and networked coffee intelligent driving 331 strategy and the Great Wall Motor intelligent hybrid DHT, are the first to be installed on the Wei brand coffee family.
At the Guangzhou Auto Show, the first product of Sharon Automobile, the Mecha Dragon, a high-end intelligent coupe model priced at 488,000 yuan, was pre-ordered in only 3.5 hours and 101 mech dragons, and aroused the attention and discussion of the global automotive industry.
Judging from the sales development of various brands in 2021, Great Wall Motors has indeed survived the 2021 car market full of black swans and gray rhinoceros events, and it is also quite good, even if it is a positive answer to the "soul torture" thrown by Wei Jianjun, the future should also be very imaginative - more importantly, this "imagination" is not only for the domestic market, but also overseas.
Great Wall Motor's overseas data for 2021 shows that by the end of 2021, Great Wall Motor's overseas sales have exceeded 140,000 units, reaching 142,793 units, an increase of 103.7% year-on-year, and sales account for 11.1% of the entire brand. It is the brand with the fastest growth in overseas sales among mainstream independent car companies such as SAIC, Geely and Chery. At present, Great Wall Motor's cumulative overseas sales have exceeded 900,000 vehicles, and the whole vehicle has covered more than 170 countries.
At the same time, Great Wall Motor's overseas strategy will accelerate significantly in 2021.
Within one year, a series of major initiatives such as the official commissioning of the Rayong plant in Thailand, the acquisition of the former Mercedes-Benz Irasamapolis plant in Brazil, the release of the strategy for the European market and the establishment of the European headquarters were completed, which basically built and continuously improved the overall framework of brand globalization. At the same time, the products have also landed in new (small) Xingxing (zhong) markets such as Egypt, Nepal, Brunei, Pakistan and Laos, and promoted their own products on a niche scale and won overseas reputation.
Not long ago, Great Wall Motors successfully listed on the 2021 Brand Z China Top 50 Global Brands, and the highest global market value has exceeded 100 billion US dollars, surpassing BMW and Honda and ranking 7th in the automotive industry.
The key to Great Wall Motors' successful completion of the indicators and surviving 2021 is inseparable from its business idea of "dividing and ruling" its categories in 2020. More importantly, Great Wall Motors has also expanded a new line of "innovating based on categories and building brands by categories".
For example, the Haval brand has built a complete brand with the SUV series; the Great Wall pickup brand, which not only includes the 2021 blockbuster Great Wall Cannon, but also includes the well-known Fengjun overseas; Euler, which was established in 2018, has quickly ranked among the top five in the sales list of new energy vehicle companies in 2021 by relying on the unique appearance design and pure electric two characteristics.
Through this idea, Great Wall Motors successfully turned the niche market into a volkswagen in just one year.
The most intuitive feeling is the Guangzhou Auto Show last November - in addition to Haval, Weipai, Euler, Tank, Great Wall Cannon, Great Wall Pickup truck and just independently operated Salon Automobile, a total of more than 10 blockbuster new cars and concept models of 6 major brands were unveiled in different exhibition halls at the same time, with great momentum. Many visitors even issued a similar exclamation: "Walking in the Guangzhou Auto Show, I feel that there is a Great Wall Motor everywhere." ”
There is also a very strict logical relationship between these brands - from the economy to the high end, from men to women, from the city to the off-road, from commercial cargo to leisure and entertainment, from niche products to the mass market... It covers almost all kinds of markets and segments of users.
Great Wall Motors not only launched the category model of "walking on multiple legs", but also began to face the next generation of automotive industry, vigorously develop technological evolution and technological innovation, and increase supply chain investment in new energy, intelligence and networking - at the 8th Great Wall Motors Science and Technology Festival, which opened in June 2021, it exhibited 112 innovative technological achievements in the field of carbon neutrality and intelligence, and promised to "invest 100 billion yuan in cumulative research and development by 2025 to ensure technological leadership".
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The most famous achievement of these big moves is the honeycomb energy that was born in 2018.
Today, Hive Energy has ranked among the first echelon of domestic power batteries and has completed three rounds of financing within one year in 2021. The total amount of the three rounds of financing has reached nearly 20 billion yuan, and nearly 60 companies and institutions have participated, including Sichuan Energy Investment, Xiaomi Group, Sany Heavy Industry, Bank of China Development, CDH Investment, and the National Science and Technology Achievement Transformation Guidance Fund.
More importantly, by the end of 2021, its Hive Power has 10 million engines off the production line, becoming the first Chinese automobile brand to produce and sell engines of 10 million units. The "cobalt-free battery" proposed three years ago has also achieved mass production and loading, and it is mounted on the Euler Ballet Cat, promoting the new trend of cobalt-free car power batteries.
Great Wall Motor has also laid out a hydrogen fuel cell - that is, its untax energy, and is also the first fuel cell enterprise in China to be fully "milked" by a vehicle enterprise. In terms of the current development of domestic and European and American countries, in the next 5-10 years, lithium batteries for passenger cars, hydrogen batteries used in commercial vehicles will be the recognized direction of the industry, according to this point of view, the future development potential of untax energy is huge.
The Great Wall Motor lemon hybrid DHT technology is based on the present. China's new energy vehicle industry development plan: by 2025, the annual sales volume of new energy vehicles in China will account for 20% to 30%, so from the perspective of the next 10 years, hybrid new energy will be an important resource and field in the new energy market.
In addition to the comprehensive layout of the new energy field, Great Wall Motors belongs to the refined development in the field of intelligence and networking.
For example, the "331 Strategy" of coffee intelligent driving, which was officially launched in January 2021, is to finely assign different "small goals" for the next three years, so as to achieve the "big goal" of "achieving the largest L4 level automatic driving coverage in China by 2023".
The "small goal" in 2021 has indeed been basically achieved: the MOCHA NOH smart pilot version with NOH high-speed automatic pilot auxiliary driving ability was officially launched during the Guangzhou Auto Show last November. The latter is the world's third and China's second full-stack self-developed mass-produced autonomous driving system.
At the same time, Great Wall Motors has also built and incubated a number of startups in the field of intelligent driving, such as Zhixing, Xiandou Intelligent and Nuochuang Technology.
At present, Zhixing has ranked among the first echelon of China's automatic driving mass production capacity, completed the financing of nearly 1 billion yuan in the A round, and become the first autonomous driving unicorn company in China with large-scale mass production capabilities, and its NOH intelligent pilot assistance driving system has been installed on the MOCHA NOH intelligent pilot version.
From the transcript handed over in 2021, it can be seen that Great Wall Motors mainly promotes new and reforms for existing categories and brands, and at the same time lays out new four modernizations and digitization to prepare for the future achievement of a technology transformation strategy, because the essence of the "2025 strategy" is to completely transform into a "global intelligent technology company"
At the "China Automotive Industry Development Summit Forum" in June last year, Dong Yang, vice chairman of the China Electric Vehicle 100 Association and former executive vice president and secretary general of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, said that 2021 is a key year for Chinese auto brands to run and catch up with world brands, to run together, and then to completely surpass.
He took Great Wall Motors as an example: through Great Wall Motors, it can be clearly seen that the transformation of the entire Chinese automobile brand has taken place. Great Wall Motors did not enjoy the dividends of the introduction of automotive technology in the 1980s and 1990s, but stepped on all the pits of self-made cars. But it is these "pits" that have helped this mainstream automobile brand to transform rapidly, transform in time, and catch up with or even catch up with this era. Such a transformation not only means higher market value and greater investment, but also more and more popular "user-centric", "user thinking" and "user co-creation" and other new ideas for car manufacturing, which continue to affect domestic large and small OEMs.
This "new car building idea" has also become a very key reform strategy for Great Wall Motors - because the essence of the so-called "software-defined car" is actually a "user-defined car", and the use of various data generated by the latter will not only affect how the car is iterated, but also an important foundation for the entire automotive industry in the future. Both users and the capital market understand that once a car company with a huge user base successfully transforms into an intelligent technology service provider, it is completely different from the service volume and commercial value of emerging car-making forces.